Conference Proceedings

Like many developments in communications technology, the Internet at its inception was driven by the military imperative for the conquest of space. Equity was not on the agenda. However, that initial military push in now part of history as with so many other new technologies and the more humane goals of expanding the recorded base of knowledge and furthering the distribution of knowledge are now the dominant ones, as this conference well demonstrates.

The papers in these proceedings addressed a wide variety of themes and came from a very diverse group of researchers and academics. Nonetheless, they manage to provide a fairly coherent and cohesive snapshot of the times as we near the end of the century. Certain old and stubborn problems of inequity remain and the root causes have resurfaced wearing different hats but singing the same tune. Nonetheless, hope springs eternal and the main gist of all of these papers is that here is a technology with the potential of helping to reduce the inequities which now confront us. The authors certainly differ in the grade they might assign to our current progress and in the methodogies recommended to bring out that potential.

We would like to thank all those who made submissions and congratulate those whose papers were accepted and we must provide a special thanks to the independent evaluators (John Ellis, Gareth Shearman, Jon Musio, Martin van Emden, Tara Ehrcke and Bruce Kapron) who ranked all the submissions and to Rowena Hart who diligently tracked down the contributors and organized them into this document.

W.D. Godfrey, Department of Writing, University of Victoria
Michael Levy, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria